My first net connection was using slirp via a shell account. Slirp was a CSLIP emulator that ran in user space on the shell box on the remote side.
Back in those days multi user shell machines were quite common and some of the first ISPs offered Internet access that way.
Mine was an ISP called Internet Access Cincinnati that gave each user shell on a Sun Sparc 10 running SunOS (pre-Solaris). You also got POP e-mail and a -username home folder accessible via web.
Ha, Running slirp in the ISP shell box was also how I first got beyond bbs'ed onto the wild west of the internet.
Also getting online was one of my first motivations for using Linux, as the Trumpet winsock networking library for Windows 3.1 was terrible and crashed the entire computer all the time.
Back in those days multi user shell machines were quite common and some of the first ISPs offered Internet access that way.
Mine was an ISP called Internet Access Cincinnati that gave each user shell on a Sun Sparc 10 running SunOS (pre-Solaris). You also got POP e-mail and a -username home folder accessible via web.